It's the long awaited, next big release from Bethesda Game Studios, and it's set to take us to the stars. But what would the intergalactic adventures of Starfield look like in a luscious 8K resolution?
It's a question that's been answered by YouTube's MR.C&A Video911Game channel, which is today treating our eyes to an 8K AI upscale of the Starfield reveal trailer from E3 2021.
Got an 8K monitor or 8K TV? Then feast your eyes below: there's no new footage, per se, but it's a taste of what those rocking a super-high-end GPU like the RTX 3090 might be able to reach on PC when Starfield launches on November 1, 2022:
- 8K gaming: here's Red Dead Redemption 2 at super high resolution
- Starfield will come to Xbox One – but not how you might think
Analysis: Any hope for 8K console gaming?
As it stands, Starfield is set to be an exclusive for Xbox platforms – anything that can access Game Pass, basically, be that an Xbox Series X, PC or Xbox Cloud gaming devices. That currently rules out the PS5.
But could the Xbox Series X or PS5 run the game in 8K anyway? It's unlikely we'll see anything beyond the most powerful of PC hardware capable of running the game at anywhere near the 8K resolutions on show in the above remastered trailer. Even the most powerful existing graphics cards, an order of magnitude more powerful than what's in the PS5 or Xbox Series X, would struggle to hit those resolution highs, with 8K only achievable thanks to AI rendering techniques like DLSS and FSR.
This is despite the fact that PS5 and Xbox Series X, ahead of launch, were advertised as 8K-ready consoles. While few expected anything aside from the least demanding of games to go anywhere near 8K resolution, so far neither console has pushed through any 8K accessible features.
So is there any future for 8K gaming on these consoles? The one ray of light would sit with game streaming. 8K video output is still very much possible from these consoles and their HDMI 2.1 ports, and 8K video processing is much easier to handle than onboard, native 8K gaming. Provided cloud gaming data centers are powerful enough to deliver 8K resolution feeds, and gamers' internet speeds make the jump to consistently stream 8K video, cloud gaming at 8K may be the way forward for any hope of 8K Starfield on consoles.
